


Things Falling

by Lise



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Creepy, Gen, Hallucinations, Horror, I had maybe more fun than I should have with this, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Introspection, Loki's obsessed with death (mostly his own), Mental Instability, Post-Thor: The Dark World, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 07:43:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8437153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise/pseuds/Lise
Summary: Loki has Asgard, the crown, and freedom to do what he wants without interference from Thor or Odin. 
It's everything he wants. 
But something's wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by a post by [proantagonist](http://pro-antagonist.tumblr.com) on Tumblr, along with some discussion about Loki's relationship with death/inability to die. Given that it was coming up on Halloween when that happened, and I always miss writing horror/creepy fic, I decided to try to write something for Halloween. So here it is. General, uh, dark themes warning, along with the AO3 tags.
> 
> Thanks to [the beta](http://ameliarating.tumblr.com) for giving this a read even though it freaked her out. 
> 
> Happy Halloween!

At night, Loki dreams of death.

Sometimes he freezes on Jotunheim, folding into the white and going quietly to sleep. Sometimes the Void tears him apart, ripping his body atom from atom. The Midgardians kill him upon capture, or after his defeat, or the green beast half by accident.

He dreams of choking on his own blood on Svartalfheim, the only time he does not die alone. Thor, cradling him as his heart stutters and staggers, touching Loki like he still loves him, and Loki isn’t strong enough to deny it.

He always wakes alone, though, and alive. He begins to suspect that is his defining trait: the ability to survive. He isn’t certain if it is punishment or some kind of perverse reward.

_Well,_ Loki thinks, looking at his own reflection, Odin’s face with Loki’s twisted smile. _I can make use of it while it lasts._ Even if sometimes he doubts his own mind, his own sanity, and has to rub his fingers up and down the scar on his chest to remind himself that he is real.

* * *

The first time he notices the shadow, it is just barely out of the corner of his eye, like a smudge on his vision. He turns his head to look and the shadow moves with him. Loki trails off midsentence and blinks, once, and it is gone.

“Your Majesty?” The treasurer looks uncertain. Loki smooths his face (Odin’s face – though what is the difference, now) and tries not to show the faint unease he feels.

“Yes,” he says. “Go on.”

The treasurer hesitates a moment longer, but just as Loki starts to frown seems to remember himself and continues the report. Loki half listens, watching for the smudge to return. A defect in his sight? He spends an hour in the evening peering at his own face in the mirror, searching for whatever it was, but his eyes remain the same.

A faint whisper: _you are truly going mad now. What will they call you? The Mad Jotun?_

Loki presses his forehead to the cold, smooth mirror and closes his eyes. For just a moment when he opens his eyes, there is something reflected-

It’s gone before he can even put a name to its shape.

“I am not mad,” Loki whispers to himself.

_I can’t afford it._

* * *

He wakes screaming and grateful for his wards, half certain that something was bending over him, bending toward him. A memory stirs but even as he grasps for it it’s gone and he is left in the dark breathing in ragged gasps.

Loki kindles a candle and considers calling a servant to bring him wine, but decides against it. His eyes sweep the corners, but of course there is nothing. The things that haunt him do not skulk in corners of Asgard’s palace.

He yawns wide enough to crack his jaw and goes to the bookshelf. One of the books has been pulled out. He does not remember doing that. He opens it to the first page and feels cold.

_For my father, in light of our recent conversation. I hope you find it edifying. L._

It is his writing, under the title: a study of the Ljosalfar, and Loki _remembers_ that conversation, or argument – he passionate and intense, arguing that the Ljosalfar could not _possibly_ share a common ancestor with the Svartalfar, Odin calmly countering his every argument. He’d sent the book, which held evidence seeming to prove Loki’s point, in a slight fit of pique, but Odin had just seemed pleased.

It occurs to Loki that perhaps Odin had been trying to train him to argue. To persuade.

Loki slams the book closed and shoves it under the bed. He pauses, though, feeling something odd in the carpet: he brushes some of it into his palm and pulls out his hand to examine it. Fine black dust, somewhere between pebbles and ash.

_(A blasted world, black and dead, and Loki wonders if it was always like this, wonders what Jotunheim looked like after his attack-_

_Loki rolls over and stumbles to the abandoned skiff, still shivering with leftover chill.)_

Something twists in Loki’s stomach and he sweeps it off his hands. His first thought is _someone is playing games with me._ His second is _that is paranoia, Loki. That way madness lies. It is just black dirt._

If someone knew who he was, they would not tell him like this.

Still, he is shaken, left distracted and disturbed.

* * *

Once every cycle of the moons, the All-Father receives all comers with petitions. It is unbearably tedious, but of course Loki cannot say so, must listen as though with rapt attention. At least he can manage _that,_ and none of the problems brought to him are terribly difficult to solve.

One young mother asks him to bless her newborn child and Loki has to fight not to laugh. He does it anyway. Hopefully the Norns will bring it better fortune than they have him.

He is drawing near the end when a woman perhaps some years older than Frigga (and oh, how he shies from that name) is ushered in, only to stop the second she sees Loki-Odin, her face turning ash white. Loki tenses, wondering if – but his glamour holds and she is no truthseer.

“What is it, goodwoman,” he asks, too roughly, but he is _tired._

(In his dreams last night he was falling again, into the maw of one of the terrible things that live between worlds.)

She shakes her head, wordless, gasping. “Death,” she says, finally, and points _at him._ “Death!”

Loki recoils, thinks _how does she know, she cannot know._ The guards look shocked, and he snaps, “she is clearly mad. Remove her.”

When they are gone, Loki nearly flees to the bedroom to study his face, but he can see nothing in the glamour that would give him away. _Death._ Does he give off some aura of it, now? Some hint of the destruction that trails in his wake?

What hideous thing must he look like, if that is the case?

Suddenly nauseated, Loki bends over and retches into the toilet. When he stands, he catches it again – something in the mirror. It is hunched over, but it starts to unbend as Loki looks at its reflection, and he catches a glimpse of white teeth, claws.

Loki cries out and wheels, magic coming to hand, but there is nothing there – and when he looks back in the mirror his rooms are empty. He can smell something, though. Sweet. It takes him a long moment to place it and when he does it puts him on his knees again, spitting bile into the toilet.

Frigga’s perfume. The smell of it hangs in the room and Loki nearly cannot breathe for it yet does not want it to go away. The _why_ and _how_ cease to matter so much. He wants her here so badly he can taste it.

The scent vanishes. No one has heard his shout, so no one has come. But that _thing._ It was here.

“I am not mad,” Loki repeats again, but his voice wavers. Perhaps it was an odd shadow, or a momentary trick of the light. Frigga’s perfume? Wishful thinking, or perhaps there is still some in a cabinet here. That is all.

_Death,_ he hears the hedge-witch say, and suddenly wonders if she spoke his future.

* * *

Loki slips out to go riding. Odin is not so old that it is strange, though the groom does give him a bit of a startled look before controlling himself.

He takes Sleipnir, who whickers and pushes his nose into Loki’s chest, and Loki thinks _you, my friend, must be the only one on Asgard who is happy to see me._

He rides out with the smallest retinue he can get away with – two of the Einherjar, and they hang back at a respectful distance. They head off the main roads into wilder fields, and Loki is surprised to see another rider approaching them.

She rides a quick, lithe bay mare and her dress is a deep, deep black accented with a green darker than his own. Her dark hair is loose and swept into tangles by the wind and her face, slightly too thin and sharp, is nonetheless striking.

Loki slows as she draws near, surprised that the Einherjar do not stop her. She draws her mare up alongside Sleipnir, who sidles a little. “What a magnificent beast,” she says, though her eyes are more on Loki than on Sleipnir. “I have heard of the All-Father’s mount but never seen him.”

“He is unique,” Loki says. “And remarkable indeed.” Her eyes, he realizes, are black. Looking at them too long makes him dizzy. “I am afraid I do not know your name.”

“I would be startled if you did.” She smiles at him widely, many teeth showing, and Loki’s neck prickles uneasily. Sleipnir whickers again, shifting sideways away from the mare and her rider. “As startled as I am to find the All-Father out riding alone.”

“I must find my solitude now and again,” Loki says. He glances subtly back at the Einherjar, but they are talking to each other, seemingly unaware.

“I am out hunting,” she says. Loki tries to look politely interested.

“Oh? Have you been successful?”

“Not yet,” she says. Those black eyes gleam strangely. “My quarry is elusive, and challenging. But I am very patient.”

“I wish you good fortune, then,” Loki says, hoping to urge her into departing. She laughs, oddly.

“I do not need it,” she says, “but your courtesy is commendable, Prince Loki.”

Loki’s spine goes rigid but before he can react she is riding away, and, too quickly it seems, she and her mare are gone. He wheels back toward the Einherjar. “Guards,” he snaps. “Mind your duties! Did either of you know that woman to whom I spoke?”

He knows when they glance at each other before speaking, and dread sinks deep into his chest, settling heavy in his belly. “All-Father,” one of them says. “We did not see that you were speaking to anyone.”

* * *

“What did you do to me,” Loki hisses. The man hunched before him, huddled in a nest of blankets, just looks at him. Loki clenches his fists. “Do not dissemble with me, old man. I know you can understand me. You have done something to me. Some magic.”

Odin Borson, former All-Father of Asgard, says nothing. Loki curses, looking over his shoulder. He should have known this was pointless. Even now, Odin disappoints him.

“Tell me what you have done and I can see to it you are more comfortable,” he says, lowering his voice. He crouches down so they are more of a level.

Odin does not so much as look at him. Not even a twitch to acknowledge Loki’s presence. Not so different, Loki thinks bitterly, from how it always was before.

“Fine,” he spits bitterly. “As you will, old man. You never were much use to me.” It is a lie, and a part of Loki wants Odin to say so. Wants Odin to answer, to _see_ him. Of course, he does not.

Squeezing his eyes closed and inhaling deeply, Loki stands. He turns his back resolutely, ignoring the throb of conscience that tells him to have mercy. _Perhaps he can fix what is wrong with you._

_Nothing is wrong with me,_ Loki wants to snarl, but something is.

* * *

The shadow, the one like a smudge on his eye? It is back. It follows him, always moving to stay out of sight when Loki tries to catch it. He changes to trying to ignore it and it seems to grow and draw nearer. He imagines it coming nearer still, hovering over his shoulder.

Opening its shadow jaws wide and swallowing him whole.

For days after the encounter with the strange rider, Loki is jumpy, nervous, waiting for her to release his secret – but she does not, for whatever reason. Loki begins to doubt he saw her at all.

He scratches at the scar on his chest. He has that, at least. Wine no longer helps him sleep, so most nights he just paces, tracking the shadow. It advances slowly but steadily, and then suddenly he cannot see it anymore. Loki imagines it perched on his shoulders.

* * *

When he was very young, Loki was terrified of dying.

No one he knew personally had ever died. It was an unknown, and a frightening one – but one he brushed against many times, with illness after illness. Frigga promised him that the dead went to Valhalla, which was a _happy_ place of feasting and joy.

Thor told him that only heroes went to Valhalla, and mostly Aesir went to Hel, where they toiled building the ship Naglfar and suffered if they had been wicked.

The fear had eased, as he’d grown older. Or perhaps had grown more distant. Perhaps it was that early fear that led to something of a fascination – almost an obsession. Loki investigated dark branches of magic: resurrection, immortality. He toyed with poisons and dangerous spells. Keeping one eye on that dark horizon.

And then Jotunheim, and Midgard, and the bridge. The moment in which he’d thought _nothing could be worse than this_ and he’d never made a simpler decision in his life than when he let go.

That was what death was to Loki now. The Void, with its endless, howling nothing, grinding until your self shattered and pieces started to float away, until you forgot there had ever been light or touch or happiness. No Valhalla. No Hel. Just nothing.

He was so frightened of it that he couldn’t breathe.

(He wanted it so much it ached.)

* * *

Winter is coming to Asgard. The first flakes of snow are falling, and Loki looks at them and wonders how long he has. A year? Two?

Maybe less, if he _is_ losing his mind. There was a hot bath running when he returned to his rooms the other day. One of his knives sat gleaming on the side, and for a sick flash of a moment Loki imagined it, bleeding out into the water. He hasn’t bled to death before.

Loki wants to laugh at the tracks of his own thoughts, but he suspects it would come out sounding mad. He would like to think that someone is trying to kill him, but he suspects if he asked he would find that no one had entered this room. Still, he’s strengthened the wards on all the entryways.

He is so tired. So, so tired. It is hard to remember why he is doing this.

* * *

One of the moons is a sliver in the night sky, the other entirely gone. It is clear and painfully cold.

Loki starts awake in the dead of night, and at first he is not sure why. Of course his nights are seldom restful, and he cannot recall the last time he actually slept more than three or four hours at a time, but something feels different. His skin prickles with unease, some ancient instinct prodding him to rise.

He stands slowly. The floor is cold under his bare feet, but nothing seems out of place. The door is still closed and sealed.

The windows, Loki thinks, looking toward him. He forgot to draw the curtains. He pads over to them and stops.

There is something in the dark outside. No. Someone, and he cannot quite see…

An awful white face presses to the glass, like some hideous drowned _thing_ with black pits for eyes. Loki jerks back with a cry of horror, summoning a knife to hand, but something freezes him in place. Long, spindly fingers rise into view and tap the glass, and Loki stumbles away from the window, his fingers nerveless, cold spreading through his chest. The scar burns.

He can see the lips moving, forming words, and even without hearing it he knows what it is saying. _Loki, Loki._ His throat closes and he can’t breathe, head spinning and panic urging him to _run, run, run._ He squeezes his eyes closed with a ragged breath, clawing for his magic, forces his eyes open again-

The window is empty. The only thing he can see is the fingernail curve of the moon in the night sky. His heart still hammers in his ears but there is _nothing there._ He rushes over to the sill and looks out, and down, and up, but there is not so much as a wisp of shadow.

“I am not mad,” he whispers, but his voice sounds hollow. Loki wraps his arms around himself and starts to shake with silent laughter.

Which is worse? The idea that his mind is finally cracking completely or the idea that something hunts him, knows his name and his whereabouts and where he sleeps?

The latter, Loki tells himself, is preferable. At least that he can fight.

He closes his eyes and shudders, a voice at the back of his mind whispering _can you? You should know by now that some enemies you cannot hope to outrun._

He closes his curtains with shaking hands.

* * *

He runs into the woman again in Frigga’s garden, breathing the sweet-smelling air as though it might help settle him. “You should not be here,” he says in the All-Father’s voice, standing by leaning on Gungnir. He begins to feel he needs it, without the benefit of years.

“You are, therefore I am,” she says, oddly, and Loki feels himself twitch.

“Who are you?” He asks again, cloaking them from hearing with a quick gesture, though he does not drop the glamour. “What do you want?”

Her near black eyes examine him with enough intensity to make his skin crawl. “You have been avoiding me,” she says finally. Loki feels the urge to take a step back and holds his ground.

“How could I avoid you when I do not know who you are?”

“You do know,” she says. “In your heart of hearts.” His scar aches and Loki raises a hand absently to rub it. He pulls it down before he can make contact.

“Tell me,” he commands. She just smiles, and steps toward him. Loki steps back before he can stop himself, a chill creeping down his spine.

“You always did fear me,” she says. Her smile is cold and white and full of teeth, and her face has changed, somehow, turning…strange. She extends a hand but he cannot make himself take it. Her expression flickers with something like disappointment.

She drops her hand and her face, her body, peel away like snakeskin. Something else unfurls from its ruin, something tall and pale as-

_(oh Norns)_

_(is this madness is it_ is it- _)_

* * *

_He is on Svartalfheim. Dying is fast, but it isn’t easy: it hurts, every gurgling breath agony, the rush of agonizing poison through his blood, the hideous shuddering pain of everything vital the blade tore through (was this how Frigga died, did it hurt like this for her, let her death have been easy and swift)._

I didn’t do it for him, _he tells Thor, because it is the closest he can come, even now, to_ you are my brother, I loved you even as much as I hated you. _But it’s all right. Loki is going to die now, correct the mistake on Jotunheim all those years ago._

_And yet in that last breath, the fear, and it is the fear he takes with him into the dark._

_But even as he surrenders, even as it_ ends, _something pulls him up short._

What is this?

_It isn’t a question directed at him. Loki does not think he could answer if he tried._

Why can I not touch you?

_Somehow, he opens his eyes. He has no way of making sense of what he is seeing, and he is quite certain his heart no longer beats, but someone is speaking and somehow he is listening, or trying to listen._

This will not do, _she says._ Let go. None are immune to my hand. Nor will you be.

_When she says it, he wants to. Wants to surrender, wants to give in, wants to-_

_He can’t. Or the fear is stronger. Or he has no control over this decision at all. He cannot say which. He can feel his body rallying. Pain returns, searing through his chest, and some part of Loki screams._

No, _she says, and now she sounds angry._ Impossible. You are mine, _but he is slipping away, everything is pain and confusion and his soul, fraying, his mind, because the living cannot know death but he isn’t living, is he, not anymore, something else-_

I know not how you have done this, _she says._ But I will find out, and I will claim what is mine.

* * *

On his knees. Shuddering, gasping, eyes watering; glamour in shreds and his scar is on fire. He claws open his clothing and stares in horror at the blood that smears on his hands, because of course it never closed, never healed, because dead things can’t heal-

(But he isn’t dead, he _isn’t,_ his heart is still hammering in his ears and he still _hurts_ and that means he is alive.)

No, Loki realizes, shivering. He isn’t. Not exactly. Something in-between, something _stuck._ One foot in life, the other in death.

(How long has this been the case? Just since Svartalfheim, or has he always been so trapped, is that why he cannot seem to die, is that why ruin and death follow him everywhere he steps, trailing him, hunting him, recognizing its own?)

“Tell me what you have done and you can have peace,” Death says.

“I don’t know,” Loki says. “I haven’t done anything. I don’t know anything.”

“I will hound you,” Death says. “I will follow you, day and night, until I claim you.” Loki retches, and it is red: bright and bloody, and has she done this to him or is this simply his body recognizing that he has been lying to it, that there was no miraculous resurrection, that there are no miracles for Loki _Laufeyson._

“Please,” he says, but isn’t certain if he is saying _release me_ or _let me go._ Isn’t sure what _freedom_ or _release_ would mean. Is it time for him to die? Could he surrender if it were?

But she is gone. He is alone, a pool of vomit without blood between his hands, tears streaming down his face. His chest aches but though his clothes are torn there is no blood on his hands and his scar remains just that.

That night, the face at his window is Frigga’s. _Loki,_ she whispers. _Loki. Let me in._

* * *

Loki sits on Asgard’s throne in his father’s skin and wonders what it means if he cannot die. Or maybe he has died so often that it now means nothing – maybe somewhere in the Void his soul came untethered and now it wanders loose and lost and he is just a body driven by memory and spite. He lays a hand on his heart and can feel it beating, but he closes his eyes and can feel himself bleeding out.

He is cracking and he fears the others can see. He imagines if they find out who he is, if Asgard learns how he has duped them. He will be hanged, at best: Loki pictures himself at the end of the rope, jerking and going still, over and over and over, dangling between death and life, crucified between.

He cannot sleep. Food tastes like ash. Loki remembers the knife and the hot bath and laughs until he is sick, wondering if that was Death’s doing or his own.

This time it is his.

* * *

Loki locks the door and bleeds slowly. It isn’t easy, fighting his own swift healing, but in the name of the experiment he has to be thorough. Maybe if he is deliberate, _intentional,_ he can break this stalemate.

His eyelids grow heavy and it is harder and harder to reopen the wounds when he needs to. His breathing is sluggish, his heartbeat stuttering, when he lets his head slip underwater.

He comes back with someone holding his head and shouting. There’s so much red everywhere and his arms burn. Hands jostle his head from side to side and he registers Sif staring down at him, fury and confusion and fear mingled in her eyes.

“So it didn’t work, then,” he says, distantly. “She didn’t come.”

“I am here,” Death says. Her ice-cold fingers brush one of his limp, white hands. “I am always here. I will follow you until you die.”

It is a threat and a promise.


End file.
